We've looked at the post election fallout for the local Conservatives and Labour Parties. Today we turn our attention to the Greens. Like many people (if not all) in Barnet, I find the Greens to be a bit of a conundrum. I doubt there is anyone who is totally opposed to the Green agenda. Even David Cameron promised to be the Greenest Prime Minister ever when he took power in 2010 (that went well, didn't it Dave). Whilst all of the other Parties can elicit a strong negative reaction, the Greens generally just get one of bemusement from opponents. As I stated in a blog earlier this week, I believe it is a travesty that the Greens can receive millions of votes and get a solitary MP. I have no doubt at all that a stronger Green presence in Parliament would be a force for good and keep Green issues on the agenda. I also believe that the Green Party should be a great motivator for young people to use their vote. The Greens have a message that appeals to those of us not haggard and worn down by the harsh realities of life and I for one am all for idealism.
However that is where it stops for me with the Greens. When it comes down to it, the cuddly idealistic concept of the Greens and the reality are two different things. A quick visit to their Barnet Party website soon reveals that the Barnet Greens are a million miles away from a credible and sensible Green alternative. They have a web page "10 ways to be Green in Barnet", which I've reproduced below.
10 ways to be green
TEN WAYS TO BE GREEN IN 2015
Eat British fruit and veg – or better still grow your own
Everyone in Barnet needs to reduce the carbon dioxide
emissions they cause and adopt a more sustainable way of life, to help
in the worldwide fight against climate change. Here’s some tips on
cutting your carbon footprint and how to have fun going green!
Food and clothing:
1/ Eat food grown in Britain when you can, to save
‘food miles’ — the energy used to bring imports. Eg, don’t give up
bananas but if you eat an apple make sure it is a British one.
2/ Eat meat no more than once or twice a week.
Producing a kilogramme of beef uses ten times the resources needed to
produce the equivalent amount of vegetarian food.
3/ Grown your own food. If you can’t get an allotment,
grow fruit and vegetables in your back garden or even on the patio,
where tomatoes, peppers and chillis will ripen nicely in pots. And if
you live in a flat, grow herbs in pots on the windowsill.
ECO-FUN: 4/ Fed up with your clothes? Swap them with your friends instead of buying new garments that take
Go by bus instead of car – and you can have a drink if you want
energy to make and import to Britain. Hold a clothes swap party!
Transport:
5/ Walk or cycle as much as possible, eg when going to the shops. It is good exercise, it saves money and you will see
sights and hear sounds you would have missed in a vehicle.
6/ Use Barnet’s many bus services or train routes
instead of going by car. You relax on buses and trains by reading or
sleeping. If you are tired (or have had a drink or two!), public
transport is the best way home.
ECO-FUN: 7/ When planning a holiday see if you
can find a way of avoiding travelling by air, which has a very high
carbon footprint. Try the Eurostar train to Paris – it’s luxurious and
your ticket for a weekend away can be as cheap as a bargain flight.
In your home:
Don’t turn up the heating. Sit under a duvet – with a friend
8/ Close your curtains at night. You can save the
biggest amount of money by ensuring the loft and walls of your home are
well insulated and by installing high-grade double glazing, but
day-to-day habits like closing your curtains and internal doors can also
help cut your gas and electricity bills.
9/ To make a meal use a microwave instead of the oven,
when suitable. On average, cooking in a microwave uses half the
electricity of cooking the same food in an oven.
ECO-FUN: 10/ Sit under a duvet to watch
television instead of turning up the heating in your living room. Better
still, invite a friend to sit under the duvet with you.
10 ways to be green
TEN WAYS TO BE GREEN IN 2015
Eat British fruit and veg – or better still grow your own
Everyone in Barnet needs to reduce the carbon dioxide
emissions they cause and adopt a more sustainable way of life, to help
in the worldwide fight against climate change. Here’s some tips on
cutting your carbon footprint and how to have fun going green!
Food and clothing:
1/ Eat food grown in Britain when you can, to save
‘food miles’ — the energy used to bring imports. Eg, don’t give up
bananas but if you eat an apple make sure it is a British one.
2/ Eat meat no more than once or twice a week.
Producing a kilogramme of beef uses ten times the resources needed to
produce the equivalent amount of vegetarian food.
3/ Grown your own food. If you can’t get an allotment,
grow fruit and vegetables in your back garden or even on the patio,
where tomatoes, peppers and chillis will ripen nicely in pots. And if
you live in a flat, grow herbs in pots on the windowsill.
ECO-FUN: 4/ Fed up with your clothes? Swap them with your friends instead of buying new garments that take
Go by bus instead of car – and you can have a drink if you want
energy to make and import to Britain. Hold a clothes swap party!
Transport:
5/ Walk or cycle as much as possible, eg when going to the shops. It is good exercise, it saves money and you will see
sights and hear sounds you would have missed in a vehicle.
6/ Use Barnet’s many bus services or train routes
instead of going by car. You relax on buses and trains by reading or
sleeping. If you are tired (or have had a drink or two!), public
transport is the best way home.
ECO-FUN: 7/ When planning a holiday see if you
can find a way of avoiding travelling by air, which has a very high
carbon footprint. Try the Eurostar train to Paris – it’s luxurious and
your ticket for a weekend away can be as cheap as a bargain flight.
In your home:
Don’t turn up the heating. Sit under a duvet – with a friend
8/ Close your curtains at night. You can save the
biggest amount of money by ensuring the loft and walls of your home are
well insulated and by installing high-grade double glazing, but
day-to-day habits like closing your curtains and internal doors can also
help cut your gas and electricity bills.
9/ To make a meal use a microwave instead of the oven,
when suitable. On average, cooking in a microwave uses half the
electricity of cooking the same food in an oven.
ECO-FUN: 10/ Sit under a duvet to watch
television instead of turning up the heating in your living room. Better
still, invite a friend to sit under the duvet with you.
TEN WAYS TO BE GREEN IN 2015This list completely sums up the fact that, as far as I am concerned, the Greens are not a grown up and sensible Political Party. Firstly, none of the points raised have any particular significance to Barnet. Secondly, to be frank, it is a crap list. There are ten opportunities here to show why you should vote Green, but they fail to do so and in some ways show an appalling level of hypocrisy. Lets analyse their list and see why
Everyone in Barnet needs to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions they cause and adopt a more sustainable way of life, to help in the worldwide fight against climate change. Here’s some tips on cutting your carbon footprint and how to have fun going green!
Food and clothing:
1/ Eat food grown in Britain when you can, to save ‘food miles’ — the energy used to bring imports. Eg, don’t give up bananas but if you eat an apple make sure it is a British one.
2/ Eat meat no more than once or twice a week. Producing a kilogramme of beef uses ten times the resources needed to produce the equivalent amount of vegetarian food.
3/ Grown your own food. If you can’t get an allotment, grow fruit and vegetables in your back garden or even on the patio, where tomatoes, peppers and chillis will ripen nicely in pots. And if you live in a flat, grow herbs in pots on the windowsill.
ECO-FUN: 4/ Fed up with your clothes? Swap them with your friends instead of buying new garments that take energy to make and import to Britain. Hold a clothes swap party!
Transport:
5/ Walk or cycle as much as possible, eg when going to the shops. It is good exercise, it saves money and you will see sights and hear sounds you would have missed in a vehicle.
6/ Use Barnet’s many bus services or train routes instead of going by car. You relax on buses and trains by reading or sleeping. If you are tired (or have had a drink or two!), public transport is the best way home.
ECO-FUN: 7/ When planning a holiday see if you can find a way of avoiding travelling by air, which has a very high carbon footprint. Try the Eurostar train to Paris – it’s luxurious and your ticket for a weekend away can be as cheap as a bargain flight.
8/ Close your curtains at night. You can save the biggest amount of money by ensuring the loft and walls of your home are well insulated and by installing high-grade double glazing, but day-to-day habits like closing your curtains and internal doors can also help cut your gas and electricity bills.
9/ To make a meal use a microwave instead of the oven, when suitable. On average, cooking in a microwave uses half the electricity of cooking the same food in an oven.
ECO-FUN: 10/ Sit under a duvet to watch television instead of turning up the heating in your living room. Better still, invite a friend to sit under the duvet with you.
1/ Eat food grown in Britain when you can, to save ‘food miles’ — the energy used to bring imports. Eg, don’t give up bananas but if you eat an apple make sure it is a British one.
Now don't get me wrong, I always Buy British where possible, but this point is an example of just how stupid the Greens are. They say "Buy British". What they should be saying is "Buy local". Let me explain. The logic they use is that it uses less energy to get an Apple from somewhere in Britain to your shop than from "abroad". In actual fact this is nonsense. Golden Delicious Apples grown in Normandy, France and sold in shops in London would use far less energy and may well have a far shorter journey than ones grown in Scotland or Northern Ireland. The Greens should be campaigning for produce to be labelled as locally grown (ie within 50 miles of where it is sold). Sadly where they could make a good point, they fail miserably.
2/ Eat meat no more than once or twice a week. Producing a kilogramme of beef uses ten times the resources needed to produce the equivalent amount of vegetarian food.
Where do I start with this one? There are dozens of points that the Greens could make here, to do with healthy living, but they have chosen purely to focus on the energy issue. So lets consider that. They say that a Kilogram of Beef uses ten times more resources to produce than the equivalent amount of vegetarian food. This is nonsense of the highest order. a kilogram of organic beef, produced on a local farm is actually far greener than the asparagus and beans you buy in Tescos that has been flown in fresh from Kenya. If you buy the steak at your local butchers, the packaging will be far less wasteful (you can even bring your own), than the plastic and expanded polystyrene that your asparagus will come in. What the Greens should be saying is "if you are going to eat beef, buy high quality, locally produced organic beef, as it will taste better, be better for you and has a far smaller energy footprint".
3/ Grown your own food. If you can’t get an allotment, grow fruit and vegetables in your back garden or even on the patio, where tomatoes, peppers and chillis will ripen nicely in pots. And if you live in a flat, grow herbs in pots on the windowsill.
This one infuriated me and shows just how out of touch the Greens are in Barnet. Anyone with half a brain would realise that the greatest threat to the environment in Barnet is overdevelopment and the tens of thousands of flats going up. None of these have gardens or patios to "grow tomatoes, peppers and chillis". We grow vegetables in our garden, but that is because we are lucky enough to have one. They have an ideal opportunity to show why developments should be sustainable and green, yet they miss a completely open goal. To me this betrays the middle class and cossetted nature of the party, failing to realise that for many, this aspiration is impossible.
ECO-FUN: 4/ Fed up with your clothes? Swap them with your friends instead of buying new garments that take energy to make and import to Britain. Hold a clothes swap party!
What can I say? The Greens are meant to be a serious party. To be honest, I find the concept of swapping underpants with someone else vaguely repulsive. There are many charities which are supported by shops which recycle unwanted clothes. The Greens could have said "Support local charities and less well off members of society, by giving unwanted clothes in good condition to Charity shops and ensuring ones which are not in good condition are recylced. This will reduce energy consumption, support good causes and give local people who are hard up a good source of cheap clothing".
5/ Walk or cycle as much as possible, eg when going to the shops. It is good exercise, it saves money and you will see sights and hear sounds you would have missed in a vehicle.
On the face of it I agree with this sentiment. With regards to walking, yes this aspiration is spot on. With regards to cycling, they have completely failed to make the point that Barnet is one of the worst places in the UK to cycle. I used to cycle everywhere, bit after nearly being killed by a juggernaut on the North Circular Road, who deliberately cut in on me after overtaking, focing me to throw myself off my bike into a fence at the roadside, I lost the confidence to cycle on main roads. In short, cycling in Barnet on 'A' roads is a risky business. How the Barnet Greens can waste the opportunity to make this point is beyond me.
6/ Use Barnet’s many bus services or train routes instead of going by car. You relax on buses and trains by reading or sleeping. If you are tired (or have had a drink or two!), public transport is the best way home.
Ever tried to get from Mill Hill to Barnet General by public transport? Or the Royal Free? Or Chase Farm Hospital?
I put a query into the TFL website to see how long it takes to get from Barnet General to Mill Hill. This was the next service
Detailed steps for journey 1
| Time | Mode of Transport | Instructions |
|---|---|---|
| 5 mins | Walk to Barnet Hospital | |
| 21 mins | 263 bus to Athenaeum Road | |
| 3 mins | Walk to Totteridge & Whetstone | |
| 27 mins | 251 bus to Mill Hill Broadway Station |
The journey takes 10 minutes by car.
I travel on the train or buses nearly every day, but getting around Barnet on public transport is a nightmare. It is true to say that there are good rail and tube links into town, but cross borough travel is terrible, as demonstrated by the TFL planner. As to being able to relax on trains on the way home after a drink, if you do that you tend to end up in the train sidings in Bedford. Often the hardest part of the journey is staying awake.
ECO-FUN: 7/ When planning a holiday see if you can find a way of avoiding travelling by air, which has a very high carbon footprint. Try the Eurostar train to Paris – it’s luxurious and your ticket for a weekend away can be as cheap as a bargain flight.
This point enraged me with its hypocrisy. At a recent hustings, the Green Candidate spoke out against the HS2 rail link to the North of England, yet here they are urging us to shun air travel. The Greens oppose air travel, they oppose new rail lines (which would be required if we all abandoned air travel) and they oppose new roads, which would be required to cope with the traffic generated by failure to build HS2. What opponenents of HS2 are too thick to realise is that one of the main drivers for the line is to free up capacity on the existing lines for additional freight and slower local services. Railways are not like motroways where it is easy to overtake. A train can only go as fast as the one it is following. If a train is travelling at 200KM/H and the train in front has to stop at a station, then it has to stop as well. The logic for HS2 is to move the fast inter city traffic to the High Speed lines allowing, better local service and freight. The Greens should support rail developments, but sadly they simply want us to go back to the stone age.
8/ Close your curtains at night. You can save the biggest amount of money by ensuring the loft and walls of your home are well insulated and by installing high-grade double glazing, but day-to-day habits like closing your curtains and internal doors can also help cut your gas and electricity bills.
Again, this belies the "middle class ivory towers" attitude of the Greens. Sure closing the curtains is a good idea, but how can families struggling on benefits, who can't make ends meet, ever hope to raise the thousands of pounds needed to fit double glazing and insulation. Most of these families are in rented accomodation and there is no incentive at all for Landlords to improve the energy efficiency of the properties they let out. Energy poverty is a huge issue for millions of people in the UK and to suggest it can be solved by drawing the curtains at night is quite insulting. Sadly for many, they need to keep the curtains shut during the daytime as well in winter, simply to avoid freezing to death. This is a huge issue and one which is far too serious to be dismissed like this.
9/ To make a meal use a microwave instead of the oven, when suitable. On average, cooking in a microwave uses half the electricity of cooking the same food in an oven.
Where to start? I really wonder what planet the Greens are on. How on earth can you cook a roast chicken or a casserole in the microwave? There are plenty of very tasty ready meals that can be popped in the microwave, but with all of the packaging and preparation are these really as efficient as baking a nice vegetable casserole? I suspect that in this suggestion, the Greens are doing what they do with many things. They ignore the fact that for most of us, we want to live on a more tasty diet than microwaved rice and carrots. Food is a pleasure and we should appreciate the ingredients and why it is important to eat healthily and properly. I really don't think that microwaving everything is the answer to a healthy diet. It may save a kilowatt or two, but the Greens really have to consider the bigger picture (ie healthy eating). This is something they've completely failed to do.
ECO-FUN: 10/ Sit under a duvet to watch television instead of turning up the heating in your living room. Better still, invite a friend to sit under the duvet with you.
What more can I say? Why not turn off the telly completely and read the Kama Sutra with your friend, far more healthy and you'll warm up far quicker. The exercise will also do you some good!
If that was the end of the matter with the Barnet Greens, I would probably not bother blogging on the subject, but there is a deeper and darker side of the Party. I was drawn to "Poppies Blog" on the Green website. Poppy was the Green Party Candidate in Chipping Barnet. On her blog Poppy states
- Labour bloggers described Green votes as Tory votes and smeared Greens outrageously.
Poppy takes issue with the fact that I consider Green votes to be Tory Votes. If we had a system of PR, such as we do in the London Assembly, this is not the case. Sadly in the real world of First Past the Post politics of Barnet Council and the General election, it is true. Every person who doesn't want a Tory government, but votes Green in Barnet has effectively given permission for the Tories to win. That, to me is bad enough, but perhaps even worse is the fact that the Greens keep bigging up their "election boost", which is clearly an attempt to persuade people their chances are greater than they really are. I have yet to hear a single sensible argument to persuade me of any positive purpose for progressive Barnet Politics for a Green vote in the Council or General elections, where there is n chance of them winning and every chance of them taking votes from progressive candidates who may actually win. For the GLA the rules are slightly different as that has aPR element.
In truth, all of this is about trying to get Poppy a seat on the GLA, where she'll get a nice £50,000 a year allowance and an office to further the green agenda. This is a distinct possibility as the GLAgiven the system of PR for members. On the Barnet Green website, the true nature of the game is revealed in this quote
In Barnet, we will immediately begin the selection process to find the best possible Green Party candidate for the Barnet and Camden constituency section of the London Assembly vote.Whoever is chosen in the postal ballot of Green Party members in the two boroughs will be able to start the campaign on the front foot by highlighting Poppy’s strong performance as Barnet and Camden Green Party candidate in 2012.
Poppy won the votes of 17,904 people, while only 13,800 backed the Liberal Democrat and the UKIP representative Barnet Greens join the #ReclaimBarnet protest at Barnet Council's AGM Barnet Greens join the #ReclaimBarnet protest at Barnet Council’s AGM polled just 7,331.
The outrageous smear that so enraged Poppy, to write the above in her comments, was a line in a blog I wrote, where I said that I thought the "Greens were not interested in People". This so enraged Poppy that she posted a tweet saying she was "unfollowing me".
What she didn't do was ask why I wrote the line. If she had, I'd have told her. I do not mean that Poppy or any of her colleagues do not have anything but the finest motivations for Planet Earth or its population, but when it comes down to it, none of their policies address the issues facing the poorest, weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. As you saw from the above list, there is nothing about the disabled, the elderly and thos suffering social exclusion. In fact I couldn't find anything on the Barnet Greens website about any polices to address any of these issues. It seems to me that Green Politics is all about grandstanding on issues only of interest to middle class people with nice homes and big gardens.
Poppy has, to her credit, been very involved in the campaign to stop the evictions of Sweets Way residents. As with many local campaigns, Poppy has been highly active and a hard working activist. Sadly, most of her Green colleagues tend to be invisible between elections.
Having said that, I don't think her involvement has been completely helpfull. What concerns me is that the commentary on the Green Website of the Sweets Way campaign is very dishonest. On the article Poppy says
“It is sickening to see the poorest in society being evicted from their council homes and removed to squalid emergency accommodation or to places as far afield as Birmingham, Luton and Watford – unless they make a lot of noise, as did those evicted from Sweets Way this week,” says AM Poppy, Green Party candidate for Chipping Barnet constituency, which includes the Sweets Way estate.This blog is 100% supportive of Sweets Way tenants and their campaign. We believe that it is simply out of order for tenants to be thrown on the street and moved to places miles away, especially when this means disruption the childrens education. We do however believe that you have to be honest about the situation. Sweets Way is not a Council Estate as Poppy implies. It was MOD housing accommodation that was sold to a private company, when it was no longer required following defence budget cuts. The company that acquired it, thenlet the homes to a housing trust and people on the Barnet Council waiting list were housed in Sweets Way as a temproray measure. Clearly the problem is that there is not enough council housing and that homes owned by the State were sold for private development. Clearly the Council has a duty of care to those familes and should have had other accomodation, of a suitable and decent standard lined up. Clearly the families are quite right to protest and it is also heartening that so many people have supported the campaign.
But what Poppy has done is wrong. She has publicly stated that the properties are "council housing". They are no more "council housing" than any other privately owned accomodation, which is rented by Barnet Council to house people. I passionately believe that Barnet needs more social housing and I don't believe that anywhere near enough is being done to address the crisis. What has happened is that by Poppy making misleading claims, some of the more obnoxious right wing political commentators, have used this to attack the genuine issues. Housing is a massive issue and it is a disgrace that Barnet Council do not have enough homes available for its residents. The Sweets Way residents, quite clearly, should have been housed in Council housing in the first place. The Council cannot have been unaware that this was coming and any responsible organisation would have started planning to avoid it. That is the issue, but by "bending the truth" the whole campaign has been undermined. The sad truth is that if you put public housing stock in the hands of private developers, this is what happens. It is called Capitalism.
Clearly when this blog is published, we'll hear the sound of many more toys leaving the Green Party pram in Barnet. Recent messages on Twitter have revealed that the Greens do not appreciate criticism. If they are to be a grown up party, they really need to learn to take it on the chin and not get the hump. I have said many things which local Tories don't like. They are however grown up enough to recognise that it is not personal, it is simply what happens when you get involved with politics. Often, they will read the blog and adjust their policies, as the intelligent response to criticism is to improve. So my advice to the Greens, and this is well meaning is this. Take a long, hard look at yourselves. What exactly are you trying to achieve? Put the weak, the vulnerable and the dispossessed at the heart of your campaign. Make your website relevant and be honest when dealing with people. I find the whole issue of the Green Party in Barnet profoundly depressing. They all seem to be quite pleasant people in person, but they take little responsibility for just what effect they've had on the realities of the political situation.
